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Post by Pizza Punk on Aug 22, 2014 7:55:12 GMT
Been working on my brain child for a long time and going through half a dozen restarts I am going back and forth with a Crunch based system or a Narrative system. As much as I love to have a simple narrative focused system I feel like the game would lose its more gamy roots, like for those who enjoy Role playing games for the strategy and combat. I have systems for both but it would be a confusing mess if I try to incorporate both.
Guys mind giving any arguments between the two.
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Post by silence on Aug 22, 2014 9:42:03 GMT
Well I like narrative, as it gives more leniency and a lot more development to the characters. It also usually sides all the players together and makes it less competitive and more a group effort promoting group play. I personally love the development part, it allows me to get really into my characters and flesh them into real people. I also enjoy the less likelihood of death brought on by this type, and again I think this makes it a lot more pleasant to play knowing you aren't going to lose your character within two minutes.
I`ll try to think of some more benefits, as well as think of a counter argument.
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Post by Nepty on Aug 22, 2014 10:32:48 GMT
When I ran A Tale of Rat & Dragon back on the old site, that was an obscenely wild success and as I recall I used dice all of once and then abandoned it complexly to the whims of my own mind.
However, one thing I may advise in any form of game, don't try and retcon anything into it. I made the 6,000 year long world timeline and by the end of it, due to my slow evolution of technology over the sphere of the world, in the second game, everyone felt obligated to be dressed for the War of the Roses as opposed to the mixed period he first game had done.
Anyways. My opinion is that both are quite fun. Crunch gives a very random feel or real life while Fluff gives a very epic feel of a story. My advice is to combine the both and fudge the die in the most dire of circumstances, but, and this is important, never let die rolls stand in the way of the story.
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Post by Darko on Aug 22, 2014 11:41:06 GMT
Moved to Roleplay Discussions.
To be perfectly honest, it's entirely subjective. I've run a lot of games with dice-based mechanics and a lot of games without any, both types leading to many successes and failures.
The original Gladiator Pit had about 28 pages on the old site (nearly 600 posts IIRC) and that used dice rolls. It was a meat grinder for characters but it was a lot of fun.
My current Necromunda game relies exceedingly heavily on dice and combat systems, yet that also shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
Then other games such as Deathwatch which ran for about 79 pages on the old site (roughly 1580 posts) had no dice systems whatsoever. Just a team of players going through various plot-driven missions. Of course that one even come close to its finish as I made plenty of GMing mistakes and the plot got heavily sidetracked.
To name a few other games from the old site, we had Infernal Designs that ran a good long while with a heavy fluff drive AND dice mechanics, it simply ran out of steam however. Fitzz's Afternoon of the Dead was purely fluff driven and that was one of our most successful and fun games ever, a solid ~36 pages.
Case in point, both work well. Even combinations work well, when done correctly as Nepty said.
The trend does seem to show that either PvP games with dice or fully fluff-driven games tend to do a lot better rather than a mix, as it is more challenging.
I think we'd need to know more about this game idea of yours before we could reasonably recommend what style to run it by, as otherwise we are just reiterating the same information without reaching a particularly helpful conclusion.
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Post by AegisFate on Aug 24, 2014 3:20:51 GMT
Conceptually, I prefer narrative driven combat, as it allows a lot of little bits of room for how things could go, although in some cases it requires discussion amongst either the GM and player or players in the cases of PvP combat. Often, its better to be realistic about what would happen in a combat situation and figure out an amicable yet logical course for how a battle would go, which I've often done on the fly in my time playing Cortex on SC2.
A guy with a rifle firing at close range at a target out of cover will generally hit that target, with varying degrees of success, depending on training and nerve. A marksman might be able to target a nonlethal part of the leg whilst a grunt will fire center mass. Where this gets a little messy is in the oft highly mobile combat tactics of a modern setting, where you've got people ducking from cover to cover and firing weapons, sometimes not even in a lethal capacity, but just to suppress.
Whilst in a more macro scale, crunch can provide extremely useful. In BFG, which is sadly flailed into death due to some mismanagement on my part, the amount of weapons and their power and accuracy of weapons suits itself more to dice, because macrocannons aren't super accurate and ships are designed to take shots.
Honestly, there's only one set of game mechanics that really has gotten a grips on how to do narrative combat using crunch mechanics, and that's the Infinity ruleset by Corvus Belli, which has models ducking and tumbling and stealthing and unstealthing and everyone reacting to each other's actions with people suppressing others and bullets going everywhere. Its also a pretty fun game, if a little mentally draining due to its tactical depth.
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Post by Pizza Punk on Aug 25, 2014 3:39:05 GMT
So I think i have a solution and strangely it came when I was working on Experience system. A crunch vs Narrative system. Crunch would rely on a more kill things and complete challenges for leveling while Narrative would focus on the actual growth of the character. Doing things in character that would provide a experience. I'm thinking of knocking off the New World of Darkness's system which uses Beats which is 5 beats or accomplishments and you get experience to then spend. The only issue with that is that the G.M. would have to be one to decide if beats work instead of fulfilling conditions on Vices and Virtues.
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Post by Nebula on Jan 4, 2016 22:02:05 GMT
I know this is a completed thread, but it is a nice one to add something onto that applies and I think a lot of people miss. In a fact-to-face game rolling dice is a dramatic element all by itself. It creates a kind of physical tension as we shift our seats to witness the results. Sometimes those rolls can be over the top drama that utterly saves the day, to much rejoicing! How many silent face-to-face campaigns have you been involved in? Rolling dice over here is simply a number over where you are. Sure, that number may cause a player reaction, but I think less so then on the table top. Creating tension and emotional involvement through text based games is harder.
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